On the night of our attack we’re ordered to keep the fires damped. We huddle close to our horses and hum war lullabies under our breaths and the loudest sounds are the stars, creaking from their hooks.

We got the Speech that afternoon, when we’d rounded the valley and found the city resplendent and open and inviting in an overtly ****** way before us.

“Kids” we were told

“Tonight we are boys and girls for the last time. Tomorrow we will be dead and will have become new as warriors and fools. We will never be accountants. We will never be lawyers. We will never heal the sick unless with spit, and harsh words, and duck tape. We will never teach anything but strength through violence and stoicism. Philosophy to us is nothing but an action incomplete. Poetry will never move us – words will never have the beauty of the bottle, or the fist.”

Now hidden by the dark, I curl myself up in my hoodie and silently whisper to my mare. She’s oak brown and placid but for when we ride into battle, and then she is a battleaxe and has no fear, only forward, as if ‘into the black night’ are the only words she knows.

But she understands me when I look around our camp and into the shadowed faces of my compatriots who will not be here with me tomorrow, and those that remain will no longer be singing lullabies, of any kind.

Tomorrow we will fight, and account for our dead, even if we won’t write it down.

Tomorrow we will make our own laws, with swords and decision and violence that would only beget more violence and only leaves everything ******, scattered, alone.

Tomorrow we will ride into laughter and remind those who have forgotten that this is Chance, this is Life. That in itself is a lesson.

Tomorrow we will fight and die and be resurrected and in what manner that will happen will be a form of philosophy.

And when you slap me on the back and wipe away a drop of blood from my cheekbone and smile, saying ‘you done did good’, that will be like medicine to me, bitter.

Tomorrow we will ride into heaven and make bedlam out of it. That in itself is a kind of poetry.

And when I watch you walk away, the sway of your hips will also be poetry to me.  

And if I find myself a bottle it will not be poetry, only a soliloquy, a lament for something lost.

And the plunder that we’ll have won from this? Well, that won’t be worth anything.

But I am that which would have the war wounds rather than the name of coward etched upon on my cheek.

And so I hum my last lullaby, and prepare for tomorrow.

Don't believe me in my screaming
Don't believe me in my silence
I can only eat what's given
I can't help it if I'm starving

What’s with all the noise?
In your head,
Boy?
I’m vibrating with it
From across the room

What was said?
Over and over
What was done?
That led you to plunder the
                         Stars in their darkness
and
                                                      Run up and down walls?

It’s the back hand of the night,
Strong-arm
Girl?
Dark side of the world, curves
She may have bent it
                       Light side of the moon, she
                                                        Illuminates us

And what did you learn?
What did you learn as the hours curled?
And can you take it with you?

And what’s with all this noise?
The scratching dawn
A creaking sun
A daughter who becomes a son
From morning to each midnight
From bed to birdcage to sharpened knife
- The secret you carry in you

Girl, oh Boy
Sharpen your werewolf teeth
Caress the beginning of day back into sleep
And promise to never grow up

I wear my running shoes every day, even when I’m just sitting

I’ve gotta be prepared

For the next time you try to run me over in your SUV and because the last time I only had those sandals you had cut the straps off. ******.

But I lost you in the woods and you’d forgotten your shotgun and when I got my breath back I thanked the universe for little blessings.

So the next day I bought running shoes, and that night I slept in them.

But you didn’t try that trick again.

You waved at me over the fence separating our back yards as you mowed the lawn. You smiled, and that made me want to run, too.
You invited me to your Sunday footie BBQ and the rest of our neighbourhood was coming but my mother has a birthday so I had an excuse.

On your birthday I baked you a cake with as much rat poison I could buy without suspicion and left it on your doormat. I watched you closely for days but you were fine so either you were not rat enough, or you had thrown it out.

So I practiced running, scouting out places to lose SUVs and dodge bullets and you smiled and waved at me every day and I wore my running shoes.

Then, in a late November, old Mrs Thompson from down the road told me you were in the hospital.

I tried to think of traps I had laid, of ways in which I had sought to ******* you and found myself wanting. I thought of my running shoes, and whether they were still sitting neat by the back door.

Old Mrs Thompson from down the road said you had apparently tripped in the dark in your own living room and shot yourself in the leg.

I hadn’t heard, hadn’t worn my running shoes that day, because I was at my parents’ house and had stayed the night after a few too many glasses of wine.

But maybe I was responsible for your injury after all.

This split lip will remind me
If only for a week or so
Why I don’t like romances

that cardboard box full of my books
the suitcase that contains my clothes
will only hold my life
for a few days
while I resettle

And for an unspecified, though finite
amount of time
This record will be
Broken
And repeating
Those last few lines

But years from now I will be wondering
What was it that you said?
And in the wondering I will realise
As I run a thumb over my mouth

It doesn't matter at all.

Cautious I feel
The shape of my skull
Tracing the lines of anxiety
Smoothing them down
Tap tapping on my clavicle
Is anybody home?
Don’t know what brought me here
Or where I have to go
But urgency at three AM
Leaves me tapping on my bones
Checking their existence
Counting out their number
Who knows what could have happened
In the minutes that I slumbered
To my ribs, I scale down
Two hips
I have knees, I have toes
But I’m still tapping at my bones
Trying to recall how many vertebrae
I had yesterday
And how I’ll count them now